Internal rhythms

I've come very close to the end by going back to the beginning. In other words, I've been spending a good bit of time over the past month back in the library of my undergrad school. As loopy as it sounds, I feel home there, sitting at a simple metal desk in the stacks with nothing but books and papers and now a laptop around me. I spent a good deal of my time as an undergrad in the library, either studying or just reading whatever looked interesting in the current periodicals section.

That of course was back before the day of teh internets, when you couldn't get any newspaper you wanted on-line and you actually had to be in the library to look at the catalog (it wasn't "online" back then -- it was "electronic"). So I've done some good work there, and the library has a gajillion books (actually roughly 5 million), which makes it a great place to find the last-minute resources. However, the real reason I go there instead of the much closer and more impressive Library of Congress is that up there I have babysitting (as in "Hey, Mom and Dad, wouldn't you love to see your grandkids this weekend?"). As my wife is feverishly working toward her own disseration deadline, it's not really possible for her to watch them, either. Note to self and others: you have a hell of a lot more disposable time when you don't have kids.

Anyway, I thought a little bit about how it was that in the last few weekends I've managed to write as many pages as I've written in the past year. One answer is simple: I've spent more time on it recently. However, I'd say another answer is that writing is a deeply personal and reclusive activity. No matter where you write, whether in a cafe, in a library, in a locked room, or out in a field, you don't really want to be disturbed: you want to be inside your head, forgetting as much as you can the world around you.

When I return to that library and sit in a hard-backed wooden chair with a stack of books in front of me, I can essentially forget where I am, much like a person listening to familiar music "forgets" what they're hearing -- it becomes part of the background (and it's for that reason that if I listen to music while writing, I can only listen to something I've already internalized).

The challenge sometimes is finding or creating that space where we forget ourselves.